


Waiting for Yesterday

by Liu



Category: DCU, Smallville
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, M/M, Realization, Red Kryptonite, Slash, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-05 07:11:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liu/pseuds/Liu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clark runs away to Metropolis... but he can't run away from himself.</p>
<p>My account of what happened slightly before, during and after Clark's Metropolis months. Possible spoilers for the end of Season 2 and beginning of Season 3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting for Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> I should be writing something else. But I could not resist.
> 
>  
> 
> This is basically an angsty re-telling of Clark's three months in Metropolis, where he realized a few important things... could be read as gen/very strong friendship if you wish to.

Clark knew he should have been happy for Lex. Helen was a good woman, pretty, smart and headstrong, the kind of woman who seemed born to become Mrs. Luthor, to help Lex become the best he could be, to stand by his side and discreetly hold his hand through everything that was to come, to forgive him his faults and keep his secrets well-guarded.

Clark knew all that. He also knew that he loved Lana, that he had been in love with her for years and now, finally, he had her within his reach; he knew that Lana was the woman for him, pretty, smart and headstrong ; and how ironic was it that he and Lex, two different men, needed the same sort of woman by their sides?

Then again, he and Lex weren’t all that different from each other: from other people, yes; while Lex wore his difference proudly on his sleeve, visible at first sight, Clark hid his own as best he could, horrified of people’s reactions. He wondered whether Lex had been him a few years back; if Lex had ever been so terrified of what others would think of him. Lex had a strange habit of worming his way under Clark’s skin, of being there when Clark needed him, never judging, never questioning whatever Clark asked of him. He had a way of making Clark feel less lonely, less… alien in the confines of his own life, because Lex expanded those boundaries simply by his presence.

Maybe that was why Clark was not happy at all when Lex asked him to be his best man. It had been selfish and silly of him to think that Lex ever belonged to him: there was too much going on in Lex’s life, his work, his employees, the eternal war with Lionel. And yet, whenever Clark was near Lex and felt as if the man focused his undivided attention on Clark, it felt like Lex was his, like nothing in the world could change that.

And how naïve had Clark been for allowing himself to feel that way.

That whole mess with Jor-El couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Clark did not want to fulfill his ‘destiny’ of being Earth’s sovereign tyrant – just another thing that pushed him one step closer to Lex and a mile away from Lana – but Jor-El gave him something to focus on, something that needed to be dealt with before he could bury himself in the relationship trouble in which he was starting to drown already.

At first, he told himself he simply wanted the same thing Lex had; marriage, family, a normal life with a normal girl. It was what he’d always imagined for himself in his future, no matter how many times his parents told him that he was destined to do great things; because even if they probably meant it in a good way, it sounded a lot like Jor-El, and also as if they still could not quite cope with an alien superpowered son. Every single time Clark learned a new thing he could do, or heard about how he was ‘destined’ to become great, it only made him feel a lot more lonely. 

So he tried with Lana: they kissed and smiled at each other and whispered all those sweet nonsensical words to each other, and Clark was happy, for a few moments, thinking it would be enough.

When he held Lana in his arms and she asked what was wrong, Clark knew that it would not, could not be enough, as much as he tried. He loved Lana, he knew that with burning certainty… but he also knew that ever since they got together, the feeling that he was losing Lex forever kept growing, towering over him like a threat of a ‘destiny’ he never wanted, never even thought about. Lex was getting married, going away even if he physically stayed in Smallville, and Clark could never reach him, touch him again, not without thinking about his wife. And his heart swelled with the love for Lana and the loss of Lex, both intertwining until Clark could no longer tell the two apart: but every single time Lana looked at him, Clark remembered what she’d said about accepting aliens, every time he kept seeing Lex’s eyes, inquisitive and capable of believing what others could not even imagine. And as much as Clark hated it, he knew that out of the two, he could never tell Lana who he really was.

He could never tell Lex either, of course. But not because Lex would not understand, or look at him in disgust or fear. Lex would be too fascinated for his own good, for Clark’s good… and yet, it felt more acceptable to be studied than to be judged.

He couldn’t solve this dilemma just yet, so he focused on Jor-El instead, on destroying the ship and his much-hated ‘destiny’ with it. A destiny that dragged him away from the people he loved (and Clark did his best to not think so much of Lex at that) wasn’t a destiny he wanted for himself. He had a strange sense of finality when he walked away from Lana, all dolled-up and beautiful in her light pink dress, as if he was walking away for the last time: he convinced himself he was doing it for their future together, that one day, that selfish ache of Lex finding someone more important to him than Clark would subside, and give way to Lana’s love. Clark almost managed to convince himself that it was necessary to do this now; that his parents were away and they would not let him do it otherwise… that he was doing it all for everyone’s good.

It didn’t change the fact that he could not look at his suit without knowing how it would feel to stand in that church and watch Lex smile at Helen in that open, radiating way that used to belong to Clark alone.

And then his mom was hurt and his little brother or sister was dead, just like his father’s eyes when he stared at the adopted alien who could never be quite the same as that baby who’d just died; and Lex was gone to start a life with another person and Clark’s mind was a boiling pot of panic that screamed at him that he’d just destroyed all the good parts of his so-called destiny.

He ran for the red Kryptonite, and Lana told him she loved him.

Clark’s mind kept echoing not enough not enough not enough all the way to Metropolis. 

………………………

He didn’t expect to find a place to stay that easily. All he had to do was look for abandoned buildings, and it all fell into place without much effort. Sleeping on bare ground got tiresome after a day or two; the bank robbery he happened upon on his second big-city night was more than convenient. He didn’t take all the money, only enough to get himself a bed and something to eat. Afterwards, he kept wondering why he should settle for barely-enough, and didn’t find any real reason.

He missed home; but the knowledge that home did not miss him stifled any stray ideas he might have had of going back. He went drinking the first few nights, and found that he could not get intoxicated no matter how much vodka shots he threw back. Nothing was enough.

On day five, he stumbled upon a newspaper: it claimed that Lex Luthor went missing in an unfortunate plane crash over the ocean. Clark was two hundred miles into the open sea before he realized he didn’t even know where Lex’s plane was going or where it could have fallen. He swam back, and it took him almost a whole day, because he was slowed down by the fact that nothing awaited him after return to Metropolis.

He beat up the burglars he happened upon, still damp and salty and cold, the only warmth being that from the blood on his knuckles as he broke a nose here, an arm there. They screamed and prayed and tried to shoot him, then turned their horrified eyes to him, and Clark deserved to have all that gut-wrenching terror on him, being a strange alien sent here to rule.

Maybe that was not such a bad fate at all. It wasn’t like anything better was waiting for him, anyway. 

He watched the papers every day for any news on Lex. In just two weeks, it was as if Lex never existed; frontpages turned to pages three, seven and then fifteen, then became half-columns more focused on Lionel Luthor’s pretend grief than on any facts of the search. When one day, there was a brief interview with Luthor senior about his largely successful takeover of some company, with no mention of Lex whatsoever, Clark knew it was over, with cold, harsh rationality granted by the red glow of Kryptonite. 

He went out to cool down, because as little as he cared about material possessions, wrecking his own apartment could prove bothersome. An ATM machine caught his eyes; only after twenty seconds of empty staring he realized it was the bank Lex had once mentioned in connection to his father; something about Lionel buying considerable shares in it simply to cage Lex again, prevent him from doing what he wanted to. 

Clark’s rage boiled over and he smashed his fist through the metal: it felt good to damage Lionel’s property the way the man had damaged Lex, tried to damage Clark’s family and Clark himself and everyone else who did not fit his schemes. Banknotes fluttered silently onto the pavement, and Clark picked one up, wondering. 

He ended up with pockets full of bills and more emptiness inside. In the next few days, he systematically searched for every ATM machine of that particular bank. It felt juvenile and petty, but every time he wrecked another one, dark, stinging relief of vengeance fulfilled kept the void in him at bay.

He ended up with more money than he could put to good use; he furnished his apartment, carelessly buying simple, yet expensive pieces to fill the space that reminded him too much of what he was missing. He avoided homely and wooden look like plague and went for steel, glass, and deep colors that felt like they belonged in rooms owned by someone cold and destined for darkness. The drawers were filled with crumpled bills instead of clothes, and it seemed only fitting to get shirts and pants he could have never afforded before. 

His pockets stuffed with money, he wandered into the luxurious shops, all bright and white and golden, and he felt an overpowering urge to run. His flannel was eye-stingingly out of place and he got into trouble with a security guy the first time; and he learned that for all the times he had been told that violence was not a solution, it seemed to answer a whole set of Clark’s issues more often than not.

He ended up having enough cash for one shirt only, never truly caring about clothes before, never having any idea of how these clothes cost. It was dark blue, a color that the shop assistant said ‘brought out your eyes, Mr. Clark’ – he did not give her his full name in case someone was searching for him, however improbable that was. As for the shirt, Clark did not care about the color as much as about the material. When he slipped it over his shoulders, the rough silk of the fabric caressed him like a well-hidden memory of something he could never have again.

That night, he slept in his new shirt and his dreams of deserted islands and salty death were shaded in Lex’s voice.

In the morning, Clark took more money and went to a different shop. He introduced himself as Kal, because the dizzying, dissatisfied rage that gripped him every time someone said his name only fuelled his general fury against the world. No matter what accent, what voice, what tone, his name never sounded like enough.

He bought several shirts, and found out that lavender looked wrong on him; he could not fit into the soft pastels the way Lex had, and he ended up with black and blue and red, the basics for that simple emptiness in his mind.

The burning started soon after that: every day, once or twice, he would have to pull off his ring and stare his cowardice and anguish in the face. He was afraid of himself, sometimes, after another round of ATM breakings or after a particularly violent robbery: he would stare at the walls of his apartment, everything feeling paradoxically alien to him, until his scars stopped burning enough to slip the ring back on. He could not stand those moments. All he longed for was to go back home then, and he knew that he could not. He had hurt too many people there, burned the bridges, destroyed everything that used to be good there.

Destroyed, and let slip through his fingers. Things he longed for in the weak moments without the red Kryptonite were no longer in Smallville, or anyplace else for him.

He always woke with a sense of loss, knowing he’d dreamed about something that made all the emptiness and ache more bearable, but he could never quite capture it. It was a feeling, a sound, a smell, and it was driving Clark – Kal – insane. He went through all the shops he could find that sold perfumes: nothing smelled like his dreams. The men’s fragrances were closer, and he even got a few that were the closest: but it seemed the scents changed the more he tried to capture that safe, harbored feeling from his dream, and he ended up smashing the bottles against the wall in a fit of rage.

His apartment smelled too strong to live in for a few days afterwards, an ironic, mocking reminder of Kal’s powerlessness in the face of his own failures. When he went out for fresh air, scented only by smog and cars and people’s desperation, he saw a Porsche behind the glass wall of a shop, sleek, silver and strangely familiar. He was at a point where he did not care about which bank the ATM machines belonged to when he broke into them: the money were easy means to get what he wanted, or as close to it as possible; he briefly wondered if that was how Lex had felt his whole life, knowing he could buy everything there was to buy, and at the same time being aware that it could never fill the void, not completely, not forever.

He drove the car at break-neck speed all around the town, but it was strangely unsettling and he abandoned it in the middle of the street, leaving it unlocked for anyone who might find any use of it.

After another Porsche and a Lamborghini, Kal realized it wasn’t the car he was searching for as much as the feel of home. It was startling to realize he’d been searching for a trace of Lex all that time, that Lex was the one he was trying to bring back to his life, not his mother, not his father, and certainly not Lana or Chloe or Pete. Maybe it was the suicidal, masochistic abandon of the red Kryptonite that made him crave the one person he could never have, the one person he had been told over and over again not to trust.

In a moment of post-attack ring-free clarity, Clark remembered the gut-wrenching fear as he’d learned about Lex’s upcoming marriage, and he knew it was not the red Kryptonite; the stone merely brought out the parts of him that he was afraid of facing as Clark Kent. Kal-El could face them; he was strong enough to carry the weight of those feelings on his shoulders.

As he slipped the ring back on, a ragged breath turned into a sob. Kal could do whatever he wanted… except bring back the dead.

Sometime later, Chloe found him. Kal threatened her to leave him alone, said that if she did not stop bothering him, he would go far enough so that nobody could ever find him again. As he voiced it, he realized he wanted that, more than anything, to just go away – but what he wished the most to leave behind wasn’t Chloe or Smallville; he needed to run from himself, from what he could not do, and he felt that as long as he stayed here in Metropolis, there was still a chance for a miracle.

So he drank and smoked and shot up, flirted and kissed and touched, stole and fought and beat up, bought and disliked and discarded. Nothing was enough, and each time he did all that, everything just felt like becoming less and less. Kal knew he could not put it off forever, that even miracles had a date of expiry and he was on a tight schedule here, even though it remained obscure to him what would happen after he overstayed his welcome in this city. The world seemed small enough to walk around, and large enough to get lost in: there were many cities on the face of Earth, many people, many burglars, many ATMs. 

There was nothing tying him to Metropolis except a weak, dying hope. That was the scary part.

It should not have come as such a surprise when the newspaper returned to frontpages and touching obituaries. Lex’s face stared at Kal from the cheap paper, in full color and life-sized, with eyes guarded and devoid of emotion as Lex always was for the public – Kal stared and tried to find a little glimpse of that warmth that used to be there for Clark, but the cheap print allowed nothing of the sort, and Kal hissed as pain wracked through his chest again. 

He pulled off his ring, letting it fall to his table, to Lex’s crooked, carefully learned smile with menacing R.I.P. over his forehead. 

The pain did not go away.

Clark bent over the table and wept, his hope fading and leaving more burning scars behind.

He went to the funeral, because he needed to know it was final, needed to see to believe, to convince that small part of him that, despite the Kryptonite-instilled rationality, kept chanting it’s not true it can’t be true Lex is not dead it’s not true, in a deafening crescendo drowning out all other thoughts. 

A white orchid rested against the black marble, a stark contrast, a reminder, Lex’s pale skin against an Armani suit. Kal had his ring on again – he did not cry. Helen stepped out; Kal did not listen for words, but her presence was enough. Even in death, Lex was hers, voluntarily and eternally, and Kal – not even Clark – had any claim over Lex anymore. Her purple flower broke the black-and-white simplicity, and then Lana was looking back straight at Kal and he could not face her.

She could never be enough now.

………

His father brought him back. Kal did not spare him, especially not after he realized the man had Jor-El’s powers. Every punch was a ‘maybe’ – maybe if Jonathan Kent had not been so opposed to Lex’s friendship, maybe Clark could’ve known it sooner, could’ve done something, said something. Kal knew it was not so much Jonathan’s fault as Clark’s own, his cowardice, his goody-two-shoes wish to just fit in and conform to whatever people expected of him, to be the good boy and then a good man. He could not simply be a good guy to be with Lex, and he had realized it way too late.

The ring, his only refuge from the flood of self-blame, was smashed, and Clark had been pulled back to face his demons. He didn’t want to: he played his role of wayward son and ashamed, embarrassed runaway-returned-home. He said all the right ‘sorry’s and did not expect much in return, moving about hollow and pained as he packed up the last few bits in the farm that used to be his home and wasn’t anymore, not for the last three months. He did not want to go to the barn, where he would always wait for a soft ‘Clark’ called out from behind, even when he could hear Lex’s footsteps long before the man called to him. That name had been an invitation, an offer, open arms there to greet him every single time Lex spoke it, and Clark had been too blind to see and hear when he still could.

He went to the barn anyway, packed up and masochistically remembered every time Lex had been here. It was startling with how much clarity he could remember the details: the way Lex had smiled or raised an eyebrow at one remark or another; the way he sat back in the old couch naturally, without the slightly mistrustful or disgusted look some people gave the old piece of furniture. Clark picked up the old, threadbare coverlet from the couch, burying his face in it: but there was just dust and his mom’s laundry detergent, and Clark folded it with a sense of loss. Lex had fit here, in Clark’s ‘fortress of solitude’, the way no one else ever did. Lex was the one Clark could have been alone with, but not lonely, the one with whom he could be silent and still connected. 

And now, he was just Clark Kent the farmboy, not Kal-El the super-guy, and the weight of his world was starting to press him down. He needed to go, as far as it would take for nobody to find him, ever; it would not ease the burden, but Clark could not imagine staying.

He kept his face carefully neutral when Lex appeared, scratched and sunburnt and smiling, because if he let any emotion surface, Lex could read him like an open book, all the longing and relief and ecstatic giddiness. Lex… it was Lex, real Lex, alive and well, his eyes even brighter than usual in his tanned face, clear, open look once again focused solely on Clark and oh, how he could appreciate what a gift it truly was, to have it now, after he’d thought he’d lost it all forever.

When Lex enveloped him in a hug, Clark was at a loss for words when it all swept over him like a tidal wave, the scent, the feel, the warmth that was Lex and that was Clark’s dreams, the perfect fit of his body against Clark’s; a wave that uprooted all thoughts Clark ever had of leaving. This was where he belonged; this was the only place where he could exist without feeling like he was missing his heart. 

Clark smiled like a fool into Lex’s jacket and his eyes stung, and he knew he could never tell Lex what he meant to him, could never express that Lex, despite all their differences, despite all they could – would – not tell each other, Lex felt like home. It didn’t matter: Lex was here. Lex was alive. And if being near him meant that Clark would have to snuff out the sparks that should not be in his heart, he would gladly do it.

When Lex bought the farm for them and handed the deed into Jonathan’s hands, he shyly asked to be seen as a part of the family. Clark only smiled: it was all he could allow himself, because he knew that for him, Lex was much, much more. Family was people one did not choose: with biological parents, it was mere chance; with adoptive parents, it was their choice. Clark loved the Kents, his parents, dearly… but it was completely different to grow up learning to love someone, being gradually eased into that love and learning to swim in the vastness of it. With Lex, it was suddenly being hit by the sheer force of care Clark had for him, to the extent that he was willing to learn to live in all his pain and turmoil and dilemmas that Smallville held, only to keep near Lex. Clark knew it was most likely only his wishful thinking, but by buying their farm, maybe, just maybe, Lex was saying that he wanted to keep Clark close too.

Clark never thought that so little hope, more invented than really there, could mean so much to him.

But for now, it felt like enough.


End file.
